‘Just check it out.’ his boss had told him. ‘If there are really that much rats I’ll send a team.’
‘Great.’ he said to himself feeling angry. ‘They did tell you that pets had disappeared, and every night they heard squeeking, so why not send a team right away?’
He opened the door to the lower levels housing the infrastructure and shone his flashlight inside. He saw no crawling pests and walked in searching for a light switch. He found the dusty switchboard, turned all switched marked lights and heard the clicking of relays and saw some brightness appear in corridors. The light at the switchboard stayed dead.
‘Don’t they do any fucking maintenance here?’
He looked at the two corridors. One of them looked even less appealing because the light there kept flickering so he went into the other.
‘Like a fucking horror movie.’ he said and followed a sign indicating the direction to stairs.
He didn’t like the heat in there coming from the heat exchangers. The humidity made him sweat and he hated that. He couldn’t avoid touching dusty surfaces and that meant getting his clothes dirty and if he wanted to wipe the sweat from his brow he’d be spreading the dirt all over his face.
‘Dammit! It’s because you heard me saying your daughter Charlotte looked tasty, eh?’
He reached the stairs and went down one floor. The heat became a little less but not enough to make him feel better. Shining his flashlight around he decided on the next direction.
‘Or is it because I think the idea of using biological pest control is stupid?’ he said and went right checking every area between pipes, switchboxes, rigging.
‘Use one pest to get rid of another? What good will that do!?’
He found a stack of old magazines and checked if these had been nibbled on. Finding nothing he tossed them back and went on with his search. Going around a corner he found himself at another part with defective lighting.
‘Fucking great.’
He had no choice but move on because he would have to search that area as well. The occasional flickering of light made him even more irritated. He moved an old box and grabbed into old cobwebs.
‘Oh, even more fucking great!’ he said and tried to get it off his glove by wiping his hand against wiring.
He continued his search looking between more pipes, a couple of large kettles, electric closets.
‘If there were any rats here they must have been eaten by the spiders!’ he said wiping more webbing from his glove. ‘But then you’d like that, eh? Just drop one of those suckers near a nest and let it run wild. Then you can fire most of us and I’ll be the first to go. That’s what you’re thinking, right?’
He looked around one more time shining his flashlight across the ground.
‘Well, you won’t be able to get rid of this rat so easily, you’ll need a fucking big spider for that.’ he said looking up at a duct.
He saw pairs of glistening eyes above two large fangs and hairy legs in a flicker of light the moment it jumped at him.